It can take a long time
2024-04-22 15:01:00 +07:00 by Mark Smith
I wrote a couple of days ago about the blogging virtuous circle. The idea is to have a repeatable set of steps that on average result in you writting some good quality blog posts every day. I'm still not really there yet, but I'm getting better at it.
When I started out blogging back around 2005, I wrote enthusiastically for several months, but it fizzled out eventually. I knew I needed a better routine. Twitter came along, and that was great, especially in the early days, but I had a nagging feeling that I really should be posting on my own site. There were a handful of people online that were running linkblogs. Basically self hosted sites where they posted interesting links they found on the web. I thought this was a great idea almost as soon as I saw it. I could see that this could be a fun, more frictionless way to publish that could increase overall blog output.
But there was no software available to do what I wanted. Since I also wanted to learn web development, I decided to take it on as a project and build some linkblogging software. I successfully built a linkblogging SaaS, but I ran out of runway, and ultimately had to shutdown the project.
All the while though I had been posting to the linkblog. There were many versions of the software and the archives in a way are a record of my web development journey. Though the SaaS project is no more, my personal linkblog lives on. It's been over 10 years that I've been posting links!
These days I run a newsletter, and I've made some exploratory and quite experimental podcast episodes. I feel like I'm closer to getting the balance right. The point I'm making is that if you are on the fence about whether to start blogging, the beet time to start is today. Start out by just posting links to interesting articles. Your voice matters. Over time you'll be able to build that into a blog, newsletter, podcast, whatever. The important thing is to start.
These days there are much better tools out there to build your own linkblog, and also many online linkblogging services. It's the easy way to get started with blogging. What have you got to lose?